We found that our best 'bang for the buck' on the EMC side was to go with VNX5300s, and get as many of them as seemed reasonable. That model is the biggest that doesn't use the capacity licensing model for disks, and the software licenses for things like the FAST suite are much cheaper. We bought five of them full of disks (120 in each) and spent around $600k.

Financially, when compared to using 5500s, or upgrading our 5700, the 5300s were profoundly convincing.

Compellent is someone we looked at both before and after their acquisition by Dell. I like their products, but we have not yet managed to do business with them. Before Dell, we couldn't get them to price competitively. After Dell we found the pricing harder to work through than our normal Dell deals, but we did get the prices down to a good range. However, we were nudged toward using a 'devil we knew' by a risk averse faction of upper management.

Also, 'three year cliffs' don't happen here; I purchase with five year maintenance contracts. And if the maintenance contract is your only reason for shopping now, then you should consider negotiating that contract. They simply are a deal to be worked out, and there is no reason that you need to pay the 'full retail' price for it any more than you would for your storage gear. The difference is that your salesman isn't really interested in selling maintenance, so you generally need to find your way back to corporate and work it out with them.

We are looking at both in the next couple weeks. We are in the 12-15K iops range and looking at replacing 3 x MD1000's (Raid 10, 15K) running SQL and two Equallogic's (Raid 50, 10K) running vmware. We have option of either iscsi or fcoe running into nexus 5k's and then to cisco ucs blades, likely will go iscsi initially and fcoe as it matures or we have a need. Our storage vendor will be presenting both in a couple weeks from a technology standpoint and give some initial configs. I am leaning towards Compellent as my mind thinks the tiering is a bit better than EMC, but I do like EMC's relationship with VMware better since we are virtualizing SQL and everything going forward.

The Compellent handles tiering differently than the VNX - I'm not too sure which is better for this functionality to be honest. Also, the Compellent doesn't have a mature NAS offering ("datamovers" in the EMC world).

Not having to do a forklift upgrade is a huge selling point for Compellent.

Equallogic is marketed to the SMB market, and Compellent is Dell's enterprise grade storage array.

In terms of support and price I can't compare either, since the place I work(ed) for has both a VNX 5500 and Compellent, but they only recently stood up the Compellent system. I don't remember what they paid for either array, but EMC's pricing came in competitively compared to other vendors if I recall correctly. Also their sales rep was smoking hot, so that was a plus. We setup ISL to merge all of the fabrics together, and both events went smoothly if that matters to you (the Clariion & VNX ISL event, and then the VNX & Compellent ISL event).

The interface for both systems is pretty intuitive I think (EMC Unisphere vs. Dell Enterprise Manager).

You mentioned two datacenters - do you need to do array replication, VMware SRM or anything of the sort? Anyway I am not a storage admin but they let me play around in both storage arrays and carve out some VMware storage on the Compellent. I svMotioned a lot of VMs to the Compellent into Tier 3 storage, then configured the Compellent Storage Profile to start using tiering once the migration was completed. Some 15k drives failed within a day or two of using tiering, but overall the latency was good from a VMware perspective and everything ran smoothly.

So bottom line: I think you will be happy with either, it really depends on what you plan on doing with the storage short/long term.

Also, the Compellent doesn't have a mature NAS offering ("datamovers" in the EMC world)

In fairness, EMC doesnt have a mature NAS offering with the VNX either. I played with the NAS on my VNX 5300 and found it lacking - I've got NAS working on VNXe's as well and find it also to be lacking. Cant say I think much of the CIFS on Netapps, but it always seemed better than EMC's offering.

I'd rather deploy WS2012 now since the functionality on that and the massively improved manageability of it makes it more compelling than a hardware/vendor based NAS, short of massive scale out systems like Isilon etc.

The difference is that your salesman isn't really interested in selling maintenance, so you generally need to find your way back to corporate and work it out with them.

Is that really the case? Used to be that EMC would sell their hardware for cost in order to get their boxes in the door, so as to make serious money on the maintenance contracts. Even if that's changed, every vendor I've ever worked with has put the screws to their account reps to sell maintenance, because in most cases the vendor makes a lot of money on those contracts. Attach rate! Attach rate!

Other than this nitpick, though, it's definitely worth finding out if you can get a discounted rate on a maint renewal. Whether your account rep is empowered to do that is somewhat dependent on the org, but often the vendor would rather you pay for continued maintenance rather than put up the whole install for competitive bid.

Anyway, VNX vs Compellent I’d have to put the victory in EMC’s corner BUT I have to add that it’s been about 9 months since I looked at either.

Now, Compellent had it good back in the day. They were the first to come out with Auto-tiering but they never really moved on since then. The biggest sticking point was that they were on 32 bit code until recently and the hardware is still catching up. This means the system cache was something like 4-8GB total. With the VNX you have more and also the SSD Cache feature (an absolute MUST HAVE feature if you go with the VNX, it’s amazing) which means your system cache can be up to 1TB depending on the array. This is a lot of cache and help so, so much in every day operation and performance.

The VNX has features such as dedup and compression. Better VMware integration. Built in NAS and iSCSI (wheras any Compellent solution is going to be a bolt-on).

Compellent offers the no-fork lift full array upgrades which decreases your effort in migrating – very attractive. However, always bear in mind that a lot changes in 5 years so you may not even be staying with the same vendor anyway. I also think they have a ‘ buy-once’ software model.

What was said above about the VNX5300 is very true. Although it can only hold 125 drives it’s very cheap, all the drives and licenses are markedly cheaper than even the next model up. I think I as quoting out a full tray of 3TB drives (30+TB usable) for less than $15k. If you don’t mind have many little arrays it’s worth looking at.

The difference is that your salesman isn't really interested in selling maintenance, so you generally need to find your way back to corporate and work it out with them.

Is that really the case? Used to be that EMC would sell their hardware for cost in order to get their boxes in the door, so as to make serious money on the maintenance contracts. Even if that's changed, every vendor I've ever worked with has put the screws to their account reps to sell maintenance, because in most cases the vendor makes a lot of money on those contracts. Attach rate! Attach rate!

I can tell you from years old that this has never been the case with EMC. Sure - they will sell hardware at cost if need be, a deal is a deal. A crap margin deal is better than no deal - Every vendor is like this.

However, EMC salespeople do NOT and have not ever (as far back as I can recall - 11+ years) been rewarded for maintenance contracts. If a customer decides to renew maintenance for another year the salesman gets ZERO. This is why they are so adapt at TCO, ROI and deals. They only make money on new. Maintenance renewals would go straight to customer services.

EMC will make their money on the upgrades you will no doubt add over the 3-5 years

Now, Compellent had it good back in the day. They were the first to come out with Auto-tiering but they never really moved on since then. The biggest sticking point was that they were on 32 bit code until recently and the hardware is still catching up. This means the system cache was something like 4-8GB total. With the VNX you have more and also the SSD Cache feature (an absolute MUST HAVE feature if you go with the VNX, it’s amazing) which means your system cache can be up to 1TB depending on the array. This is a lot of cache and help so, so much in every day operation and performance.

The VNX has features such as dedup and compression. Better VMware integration. Built in NAS and iSCSI (wheras any Compellent solution is going to be a bolt-on).

FAST Cache is nice, but its not stunning by any means - it should come free with the device though. And I disagree that NAS and iSCSI are built in, in so far as its fundamentally still a Celerra with a Clariion combined. You still have to assign disk to the NAS head for it to be used, and once you do so you cant utilise that space as block - that isnt integration, thats just 2 components in a single chassis. It'd largely be no different to what Compellant would offer, surely.

As for dedupe/compression? There's no block level dedupe coming in anytime soon, and the only dedupe I can see is file level with the NAS side of things.

Now, Compellent had it good back in the day. They were the first to come out with Auto-tiering but they never really moved on since then. The biggest sticking point was that they were on 32 bit code until recently and the hardware is still catching up. This means the system cache was something like 4-8GB total. With the VNX you have more and also the SSD Cache feature (an absolute MUST HAVE feature if you go with the VNX, it’s amazing) which means your system cache can be up to 1TB depending on the array. This is a lot of cache and help so, so much in every day operation and performance.

The VNX has features such as dedup and compression. Better VMware integration. Built in NAS and iSCSI (wheras any Compellent solution is going to be a bolt-on).

FAST Cache is nice, but its not stunning by any means - it should come free with the device though. And I disagree that NAS and iSCSI are built in, in so far as its fundamentally still a Celerra with a Clariion combined. You still have to assign disk to the NAS head for it to be used, and once you do so you cant utilise that space as block - that isnt integration, thats just 2 components in a single chassis. It'd largely be no different to what Compellant would offer, surely.

As for dedupe/compression? There's no block level dedupe coming in anytime soon, and the only dedupe I can see is file level with the NAS side of things.

In my opinion FAST cache is the single best thing on the VNX. It's simple and it works amazingly well.

The whole 'not really NAS because it's a separate array' is, in my opinion, a moot point because nobody cares these days. That was a selling point 5+ years ago. Now it's buried on page 7 of a Netapp deck (whom I love). From a user perspective as long as you're using the same GUI to manage the package it's integrated as far as they're concerned.

Now Compellent were using various NAS players in the day - a handful of startups. Then they tried to put Dell's own acquisition in front of the array. Net results is NAS is a moving target with Compellent and last i heard very much just a bolt on, no integrated management, etc.

In my opinion FAST cache is the single best thing on the VNX. It's simple and it works amazingly well.

The whole 'not really NAS because it's a separate array' is, in my opinion, a moot point because nobody cares these days. That was a selling point 5+ years ago. Now it's buried on page 7 of a Netapp deck (whom I love). From a user perspective as long as you're using the same GUI to manage the package it's integrated as far as they're concerned.

Now Compellent were using various NAS players in the day - a handful of startups. Then they tried to put Dell's own acquisition in front of the array. Net results is NAS is a moving target with Compellent and last i heard very much just a bolt on, no integrated management, etc.

Firstly, since recently I've been getting in to trouble in text format since I've been writing too bluntly, I'm not having a go at you at all.

Now, users dont use VNX storage arrays. VNXe, maybe, but not VNX and sure as hell not Netapp. As pretty as EMC have tried to make Unisphere, it has nothing on the Equallogic interface + SanHQ, and frankly I think that even the HP P4000 CMC is better (though, not by much). Saying users dont care because its the same GUI isnt entirely true - if I'm dropping $50k on an array, I want to know its features and capabilities and that they're easily exposed - not that its all in a nice pseudo pretty interface.

If I were selling a unified device and claimed it as unified storage, then I'd be selling a product that is actually unified. Right now, Unisphere is a pretty front end to 2 disparate systems that largely have no interaction with each other, and its pretty evident when I have to manage networks and storage is separate sections of the same interface.

I do agree about FAST Cache, in that it is the single best thing on the VNX - but it should come bundled with the unit to be honest. But at the same time, I'm not entirely sure its saying much about the unit if only the caching is the best feature.

The one standout fact I remember from my anti-Compellent competitive training at EMC was that as you add shelves to a Compellent array, you lose potential front-end capacity. Additional shelves require additional IO modules to be added to the Compenllent controllers, and each IO module for shelves occupies a PCIe slot. Each front-end IO module for clients also uses a PCIe slot. So--or so goes the EMC competitive training--as you expand the array larger, you must add more back-end IO cards at the expense of front-end IO cards.

This leads--again, according to what EMC indoctrinated us with--to a situation where a fully-populated Compellent array is using almost all of its card slots for back-end IO and your front-end ports are badly oversubscribed.

Quote:

Now, users dont use VNX storage arrays. VNXe, maybe, but not VNX and sure as hell not Netapp. As pretty as EMC have tried to make Unisphere, it has nothing on the Equallogic interface...

As a long time EMC admin before going to work for EMC, I can say that I did 95% of my EMC NAS admin tasks from the command line and 95% of my EMC SAN admin tasks from ECC (now rebranded as "ProSphere"). Unisphere is different, and I'd probably use it more, but it's still very....EMC-flavored, if that makes sense. They're really trying, but they've got a real long tail to carry with them.

Edited to add - If I were buying a new SAN, and the choice was between a VNX5500 and Compellent, and I were a legacy EMC customer...I'd have a hard time not sticking with EMC. At the very least, you should make it a point to be clear with EMC that you're shopping Compellent, and make it clear to Dell that you're considering them against VNX. Both companies have extremely aggressive take-out incentives against each other right now. EMC reps who lose to Compellent are punished (to the point where a loss to compellent might mean their jobs), and will do damn near ANYTHING, including pants-on-floor pricing, to not lose. They are spiffed heavily on wins against Compellent, with extra commission and sometimes even large cash bonuses. The story is identical for the Dell reps--they're given huge spiffs for displacing EMC, especially mid-range VNX, with Compellent.

You're at least in a good spot, and you should be able to get outstanding pricing. I think it's fair at this point to say that Dell has replaced NetApp as EMC's #1 most-hated enemy (not necessarily biggest competitor, but definitely most-hated enemy).

I think it's fair at this point to say that Dell has replaced NetApp as EMC's #1 most-hated enemy (not necessarily biggest competitor, but definitely most-hated enemy).

How long has it been since Dell were reselling CLARiiON, three years or so?

The Big Divorce was in 2010, yeah. I think there are still some Dell-sold CX systems out there (either "black" systems, which are Dell-branded Clariions, or "purple" systems, which are EMC-branded systems resold via Dell), but that number has got to be quickly headed down to zero as the maintenance expires. Plus, both EMC & Dell were offering heavily discounted trade-up plans for all black & purple systems in order to get them off the floor and replaced with new stuff.

I am going to be straight about Emc. They have not purchased lunch for us yet, even after several meetings.

Kidding aside, that seems...odd. I mean, obviously you don't base your purchasing decisions on being taken out to lunch, but I don't know of any EMC enterprise sales team (including the two I was a part of) that didn't do lunch on, like, the first freaking meeting. Even for the customers who came off as cold and angry and utterly uninterested, we'd at least offer all the time.

That is correct--their FY is aligned to CY, and Q4 is the busiest quarter. The reps' quotas are divided such that Q4 has proportionally more dollars assigned to it than the other three--so, instead of having to do 25% of your yearly quota each quarter, they usually chop it like Q1 is 18%, Q2 is 20%, Q3 is 22%, and Q4 is 40% (it all varies by rep and by goal, though).

December 15 is what they are pushing to close for. Dell is pushing for close January 15th or earlier.

EMC brought in a VAR for us to deal with directly, we were not impressed at all with their level of service andrequested another company. It was very odd especially considering we have a good purchasing track record and Iwould say we are quite easy to deal with.

Looks interesting, wonder if they got rid of the stupid pay per drive software licensing? Also I wonder what they're using for the "HP 3PAR Online Import" software, one of our biggest painpoints in getting off our last SAN was getting a window where we could move servers with physical LUN's and the Compellent's capability to federate a LUN to do that transition was a major checkmark in their column.

*edit*Nope, looks like you still need the stupid software LTU's, the base OS LTU is $2,000 list per magazine or $500 per drive (I think the magazines are still 4 drives for the 7000 series even though they don't appear to use the physical magazines). Add on the adaptive optimization licenses and you've doubled your cost per disk from their already inflated hardware cost. I'm thinking Compellent or VNX's all in suite pricing is going to work out to a LOT less over 5 years for us since we tend to buy as we need rather than buying a bunch of capacity up-front that's just going to sit on the floor sucking up power.

December 15 is what they are pushing to close for. Dell is pushing for close January 15th or earlier.

EMC brought in a VAR for us to deal with directly, we were not impressed at all with their level of service andrequested another company. It was very odd especially considering we have a good purchasing track record and Iwould say we are quite easy to deal with.

Are you a commercial account for EMC? That would explain both the cold shoulder and the VAR. I can't imagine why else they'd be doing it, unless in your specific geo the reps are getting spiff'd for running deals through partners.

December 15 is what they are pushing to close for. Dell is pushing for close January 15th or earlier.

EMC brought in a VAR for us to deal with directly, we were not impressed at all with their level of service andrequested another company. It was very odd especially considering we have a good purchasing track record and Iwould say we are quite easy to deal with.

Are you a commercial account for EMC? That would explain both the cold shoulder and the VAR. I can't imagine why else they'd be doing it, unless in your specific geo the reps are getting spiff'd for running deals through partners.

We have had similar activity with EMC. The last year they have been giving more and more accounts to us (mostly great accounts).

I think they are gradually trying to move more towards a channel model and do less and less business direct. A lot of deals which we had very little to do with are pushed through us simply for transaction, apparently there needs to be a very good reason if business is to be done direct.

So the lid is off on the new 3par arrays. The benchmarks I have seen say we smoke VNX and come out cheaper plus they are true active/active arrays and the four node boxes don't go into write through when you lose a controller which is nice for online updates etc. In any case here is the link on the register...

Looks interesting, wonder if they got rid of the stupid pay per drive software licensing? Also I wonder what they're using for the "HP 3PAR Online Import" software, one of our biggest painpoints in getting off our last SAN was getting a window where we could move servers with physical LUN's and the Compellent's capability to federate a LUN to do that transition was a major checkmark in their column.

*edit*Nope, looks like you still need the stupid software LTU's, the base OS LTU is $2,000 list per magazine or $500 per drive (I think the magazines are still 4 drives for the 7000 series even though they don't appear to use the physical magazines). Add on the adaptive optimization licenses and you've doubled your cost per disk from their already inflated hardware cost. I'm thinking Compellent or VNX's all in suite pricing is going to work out to a LOT less over 5 years for us since we tend to buy as we need rather than buying a bunch of capacity up-front that's just going to sit on the floor sucking up power.

The licenses go frame unlimited with a small number of spindles and the pricing has been fixed so you dont have to have massive discounts to be cost comparative...

Looks interesting, wonder if they got rid of the stupid pay per drive software licensing? Also I wonder what they're using for the "HP 3PAR Online Import" software, one of our biggest painpoints in getting off our last SAN was getting a window where we could move servers with physical LUN's and the Compellent's capability to federate a LUN to do that transition was a major checkmark in their column.

*edit*Nope, looks like you still need the stupid software LTU's, the base OS LTU is $2,000 list per magazine or $500 per drive (I think the magazines are still 4 drives for the 7000 series even though they don't appear to use the physical magazines). Add on the adaptive optimization licenses and you've doubled your cost per disk from their already inflated hardware cost. I'm thinking Compellent or VNX's all in suite pricing is going to work out to a LOT less over 5 years for us since we tend to buy as we need rather than buying a bunch of capacity up-front that's just going to sit on the floor sucking up power.

The licenses go frame unlimited with a small number of spindles and the pricing has been fixed so you dont have to have massive discounts to be cost comparative...

Magazines are a single spindle.

Good to know, I'm waiting for a call back from our inside sales teams HP Storage expert for those kinds of details. If the pricing is reasonable for licensing up to frame unlimited then we're a likely candidate =)

Do you know what tech they're using for the EVA online migration piece?

Have you had NetApp pitch? I don't sell hardware, but VMware on NetApp is as good as it gets. Given you have an array forklift migration (CX to whatever) upcoming, you should explore all options. You should also hear the Clustered Ontap pitch for block storage, which IMHO isn't touted enough. In your environment, you could deploy a 2 node Cluster today, add nodes as necessary, and when time for a tech refresh, buy new nodes, add them to cluster, move data and interfaces, deactivate old nodes. Done. No more forklifts. You can do iscsi/FC(oE),NFS and CIFS on the same cluster. You can have heterogeneous NetApp clusters - if you buy a 2xxx for your secondary site, but you make an acquisition and that site grows, you could replace with a 3xxx, and have the 2xxx and 3xxx in the same cluster, or ship the 2xxx to the main site, and add it to the cluster there.

Good to know, I'm waiting for a call back from our inside sales teams HP Storage expert for those kinds of details. If the pricing is reasonable for licensing up to frame unlimited then we're a likely candidate =)

Do you know what tech they're using for the EVA online migration piece?

Peer Motion deals with HP 3PAR to HP 3PAR arrays only whereas Online import deals with HP EVA to HP 3PAR arrays. Better summary is here. So if you are moving from a different vendor I'm not 100% of whats available for a migration plan. This functionality is offered for 180 days after install.

Have you had NetApp pitch? I don't sell hardware, but VMware on NetApp is as good as it gets. Given you have an array forklift migration (CX to whatever) upcoming, you should explore all options. You should also hear the Clustered Ontap pitch for block storage, which IMHO isn't touted enough. In your environment, you could deploy a 2 node Cluster today, add nodes as necessary, and when time for a tech refresh, buy new nodes, add them to cluster, move data and interfaces, deactivate old nodes. Done. No more forklifts. You can do iscsi/FC(oE),NFS and CIFS on the same cluster. You can have heterogeneous NetApp clusters - if you buy a 2xxx for your secondary site, but you make an acquisition and that site grows, you could replace with a 3xxx, and have the 2xxx and 3xxx in the same cluster, or ship the 2xxx to the main site, and add it to the cluster there.

im gonna drink the koolaid with this guy, but what he said. Take a look at the FAS series from Netapp and Cluster Mode.

So you need 60TB usable, 9,000 IOPS, and have a budget of around $800k? I am I reading that right? If so it'd be a no brainer to get a 6 module 3TB XIV gen3 for about half that cost. It'd be cruising comfortably at 9,000 IOPS, with several times that in reserve. 84TB usable, expandable to 243TB. You can add SSD cache up front or after the fact for about a 10% upcharge, but honestly at 9,000 IOPS you probably don't need it. All features are included, no licensing, the management interface and system architecture is a generation ahead of any other tier 1 array that I have seen. It has an online migration/proxy migration type feature as well, no cost. Sync/async replication is no cost.

Plus you'd get an actual tier 1 array, not a tier 2 like most of the other suggestions (3Par is the only tier 1 array I see being talked about in the thread).

Download the new XIV 4.0 GUI. Play with it in demo mode. If you can't see how it would make your life easier, well..

Have you had NetApp pitch? I don't sell hardware, but VMware on NetApp is as good as it gets. Given you have an array forklift migration (CX to whatever) upcoming, you should explore all options. You should also hear the Clustered Ontap pitch for block storage, which IMHO isn't touted enough. In your environment, you could deploy a 2 node Cluster today, add nodes as necessary, and when time for a tech refresh, buy new nodes, add them to cluster, move data and interfaces, deactivate old nodes. Done. No more forklifts. You can do iscsi/FC(oE),NFS and CIFS on the same cluster. You can have heterogeneous NetApp clusters - if you buy a 2xxx for your secondary site, but you make an acquisition and that site grows, you could replace with a 3xxx, and have the 2xxx and 3xxx in the same cluster, or ship the 2xxx to the main site, and add it to the cluster there.

NetApp is a creaky old platform with no path forward. Sure they've put lipstick on the pig but it's taken 10 years to get the Spinaker feature set integrated with many stumbles along the way. They have proven they can not innovate any longer, and even purchasing IP to drive innovation has been a massive failure when it comes to their mainline FAS series.

It will be interesting to see where NetApp goes in the next few years. They need a complete FAS platform overhaul - hardware and software from the ground up. If they don't they will continue to fall further behind EMC, 3Par, XIV, and even new players like Compellent, Nimble, etc, etc.